On 5/2/2017 2:29 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 2 May 2017 9:57 p.m., "Brent Meeker" <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 5/2/2017 1:09 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 2 May 2017 7:21 p.m., "Brent Meeker" <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 5/2/2017 1:01 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Your answer seems to be that physics can be an illusion of
digital thought, therefore primary physics is otiose. But
thought can't be a consequence of physics because....well
you just don't see how it could be.
Not at all. It cannot be because you need to give a role to
the primary matter which is not emulable by the UD, nor
FPI-recoverable.
The obvious "role" is that some things exist and some don't.
I don't know anyone who calls this "primary matter", but it's
what is not UD emulable.
But what are your grounds for discriminating which things exist
and which don't?
Empiricism.
That's a slogan not an explanation.
That's right - you asked for grounds.
If anything, it strikes me that the history of human enquiry is
rather conducive to the view that whatever limits we try to
impose on "what exists" are in all likelihood destined soon to be
surpassed.
Actually it has been the reverse. Relativity places a limit on
speed, quantum mechanics places a limit on measurements, Goedel
found a limit on proofs. Laplace was the last physicist who
thought we could predict everything. We haven't been the center
of the universe for a long time.
Very selective. What about the string landscape, eternal inflation or
for that matter the CUH? Maybe you'll say that these are as yet
unproven hypotheses, but are you willing to say in principle​ they're
barking up the wrong tree?
Except for eternal inflation, they aren't even developed enough to be
hypotheses. I'm willing to bet that they will imply limits on what
exists. Even CUH does that, it implies real numbers and theories that
assume them don't exist.
In any case, I still don't see that you've made a convincing
argument for your "groundless" circular explanations.
It's not an argument - it's an observation that that's the way
explanations work.
Not all explanations. And in particular not ontological ones.
You mean the fundamental elements of a theory - whose existence doesn't
have an explanation. My idea of an explanation is one that brings
understanding - not just stops explaining.
For example, based on your remarks above, you implicitly exclude
"non physical" computations from your ontology (not forgetting
what you said about ontology being theory dependent).
Not at all. I've never tried to make my "virtuous circle of
explanation" exhaustive. I generally include "mathematics" in it,
but just as indicator for all kinds of abstract, symbolic based
systems.
A theory explicitly based on a computational ontology includes
both physical and non physical. Of course you could go on to say
that a physical computer could compute anything computable; but
in that case we find ourselves at step 7 of the UDA and the
putative physical machine then takes on the aspect of Bruno's
invisible horses. Unless you want to say that the comp derivation
of physics is thereby merely contingently impossible.
My reservation about that argument is Bruno argues as if all the
UD has to do is reach some state and it will have instantiated his
(or someone's) consciousness. But then I ask myself,
"Consciousness of what?" He thinks the external world is a kind
of shared illusion of an equivalence class of "consciousness"
states. This is like the Boltzmann brain paradox without the
solipism. The reasonable way I can see such an equivalence class
having a non-zero measure is if the physics is computed - not just
the conscious perceptions of physics. Then the physics and
consciousness are not different ontologically, they are just
different ways of organizing the states (like Bertrand Russell's
neutral monism).
Is this really different from what comp implies? Surely the
computation of the physics and its appearance are indeed two different
views of the same thing - 3p and 1p plural? As we appeared to have
agreed​ earlier, at the point where physical computation and the
substantive perception (aka reality) with which it is entangled emerge
in tandem, virtuous explanatory equilibrium has been attained. But the
difference in views is the key. The former (aka 3p or in my parlance
the view from nowhere) is the ontology and the latter the epistemology
it implies.
But so far there is nothing in Bruno's theory that makes them "the same
thing" every 1p thread of experience could be unrelated to every other
- there would be no intersubjective agreement (or it would be of measure
zero). I think this is what he calls "the white rabbit" problem.
But this doesn't answer my empirical tequila test. Bruno replied
that the (physical) tequila just interfered with the (physical)
perception. But in that case the tequila would have no affect on
mathematical reasoning - but it does.
You lost me.
Have a few shots and then find the square root of 69696 in your head.
According to Bruno our physical being is only a way of interacting with
other physical things (like tequila), but for knowledge and beliefs
about numbers the physical is otiose.
Brent
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